With a focus on the areas of theory, literature, culture, society and film, this collection of essays examines, questions and broadens the applicability of Postcolonialism and Islam from a multifaceted and cross-disciplinary perspective.Topics covered include the relationship between Postcolonialism and Orientalism, theoretical perspectives on Postcolonialism and Islam, the position of Islam within postcolonial literature, Muslim identity in British and European contexts, and the role of Islam in colonial and postcolonial cinema in Egypt and India. At a time at which Islam (...) continues to be at the centre of increasingly heated and frenzied political and academic deliberations, Postcolonialism and Islam offers a framework around which the debate on Muslims in the modern world can be centred.Transgressing geographical, disciplinary and theoretical boundaries, this book is an invaluable resource for students of Islamic Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociolgy and Literature. (shrink)

“It is important to stress that a variety of positions with respect to feminism, nation, religion and identity are to be found in Anglophone Arab women’s writings. This being the case, it is doubtful whether, in discussing this literary production, much mileage is to be extracted from over emphasis of the notion of its being a conduit of ‘Third World subaltern women.’” Building on Geoffrey Nash’s statement and reflecting on Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of minor literature and Gloria (...) Anzaldua’s Borderland, we will discuss in this paper how the writings of Arab Anglophone women are specific minor and borderland narratives within minor literature through a tentative localization of Arab women’s English literature into distinct and various categories. By referring to various bestselling English works produced by Arab British and Arab American women authors, our aim is to establish a new taxonomy that may fit the specificity of these works. (shrink)

Macmillan papermac 3003. Bibliography: p. 80-81.

Beginning with Berkeley and Leibniz, philosophers have been puzzled by the close yet ambivalent association in Newton's ontology between God and absolute space and time. The 1962 publication of Newton's highly philosophical manuscript De Gravitatione has enriched our understanding of his subtle, sometimes cryptic, remarks on the divine underpinnings of space and time in better-known published works. But it has certainly not produced a scholarly consensus about Newton's exact position. In fact, three distinct lines of interpretation have emerged: Independence: space (...) and time are not essentially related to God. Causation: space and time are caused by God. Assimilation: space and time are attributes of God. This paper defends the third interpretation against the first two by drawing out the under-appreciated influence of Descartes' metaphysics on Newton's ‘physico-theology’. (shrink)

In two rarely discussed passages – from unpublished notes on the Principles of Philosophy and a 1647 letter to Chanut – Descartes argues that the question of the infinite extension of space is importantly different from the infinity of time. In both passages, he is anxious to block the application of his well-known argument for the indefinite extension of space to time, in order to avoid the theologically problematic implication that the world has no beginning. Descartes concedes that we always (...) imagine an earlier time in which God might have created the world if he had wanted, but insists that this imaginary earlier existence of the world is not connected to its actual duration in the way that the indefinite extension of space is connected to the actual extension of the world. This paper considers whether Descartes’s metaphysics can sustain this asymmetrical attitude towards infinite space vs. time. I first consider Descartes’s relation to the ‘imaginary’ space/time tradition that extended from the late scholastics through Gassendi and More. I next examine carefully Descartes’s main argument for the indefinite extension of space and explain why it does not apply to time. Most crucially, since duration is merely conceptually distinct from enduring substance, the end or beginning of the world entails the end or beginning of real time. In contrast, extension does not depend on any enduring substance besides itself. (shrink)

RésuméDans sa présentation récente de la «dialectique de la création» dans la philosophie du XVIIe siècle, Thomas Lennon suggère que les hypothèses de Descartes concernant la causalité conduisent à un dilemme : Descartes doit accepter soit une certaine sorte d'émanationnisme panthéiste, soit l'émergence de la réalité ex. nihilo. Dans cet article, je défends en détail cette suggestion de Lennon. Au cœur de la question se trouve la notion cartesienne de la possession éminente. Si cette notion est interprétée dans ce que (...) j'appelle un sens «réaliste», ainsi que Descartes lui-mêmesemble l'avoir fait, alors il n'y a pas moyen d'éviter l'émanationnisme panthéiste. Si la possession est interprétée dans ce que j'appelle un sens «réductionniste», comme l'ont fait la plupart des commentateurs récents, alors le principe causal fundamental de Descartes se révèle soit arbitraire soit trivial. (shrink)

In line with the semantic conception of scientific theories, I develop an account of the intertheory relation of comparative structural similarity. I argue that this relation is useful in explaining the concept of verisimilitude and I support this contention with a concrete historical example. Finally, I defend this relation against the familiar charge that the concept of similarity is insufficiently objective.

The Scottish philosopher Norman Kemp Smith (1872–1958) is best known for his 1929 English translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and for his incisive commentaries on Descartes, Hume, and Kant. These achievements have overshadowed his original philosophical work in several areas, including the experience of time. A realist with idealist sympathies, Kemp Smith developed a non-transcendental version of Kant’s conception of time as a ‘pure intuition’ (though he insisted that temporal perception involved ‘categories’). He employed this conception to solve (...) a problem that was widely discussed in early twentieth-century European and American philosophy, which William James dubbed the ‘specious present’: how can we perceive an extended duration, like a full golf swing, or the cadence of a brief tune, if we only perceive the present? A closely related problem: if we only ever perceive the present, how can we distinguish among the future, present, and past? In this paper, I explain Kemp Smith’s proposed solution, and compare it with two of his contemporary influences: Samuel Alexander and George F. Stout. Finally, I suggest that these problems are still with us, and are likely to be for some time, especially if we ignore the insights offered by earlier discussions. (shrink)

Richard Popkin opened an early paper with the observation "No figure in the history of European philosophy has had a more direct and enduring influence on American thought than George Berkeley."2 Popkin's case for Berkeley's "enduring" influence well into classical pragmatism is compelling.3 But in what follows I will be concerned with his more "direct" influence on the Connecticut philosopher and theologian Samuel Johnson —not to be confused with the English stone-kicking confuter of Berkeley—during Berkeley's brief, abortive Rhode Island sojourn (...) of 1729–31. Johnson studied classics and history at the nascent Yale College, until, "accidentally lighting on Lord Bacon's Instauratio Magna or Advancement of... (shrink)

Rousseau’s founding critique of liberalism, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, takes the ambiguous form of a sweeping myth of civilization. Political theorists usually interpret the myth by reading it as a tale of passage from primordial nature to civil society, but what happens when we privilege another of the essay’s organizing devices, its symbolic depiction of the history of the species as the life of an individual? Interpreted through this metaphor, Rousseau’s myth becomes a charged tale of a (...) ‘life’ gone wrong, one that sheds interesting light on his critique of bourgeois society and selfhood. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Religious Knowledge: Skepticism, Fideism, Reasonableness Atheism and Deism Science and Religion Biblical Criticism and the History of Religion Materialism and Immaterialism God, Space, and Time Creation, Freedom, and Laws of Nature Works cited.

When McTaggart puts Spinoza on his short list of philosophers who considered time unreal, he is falling in line with a reading of Spinoza’s philosophy of time advanced by contemporaneous British Idealists and by Hegel. The idealists understood that there is much at stake concerning the ontological status of Spinozistic time. If time is essential to motion then temporal idealism entails that nearly everything—apart from God conceived sub specie aeternitatis—is imaginary. I argue that although time is indeed ‘imaginary’—in a sense (...) ‘no one doubts’ as Spinoza says—there is no good reason to infer that bodies, the infinite modes, and conatus are imaginary in the same sense. To avoid this conflation, we need to follow Spinoza in carefully distinguishing between tempus and duratio. Duration is not only real; it has all the structure needed to ground Spinozistic motion, bodies and conatus. (shrink)

Whilst there has been much talk about the supposed 'banality of evil', there has been comparatively little discussion of the putatively parallel notion of the 'banality of good'. This paper explores some of the resonances of the phrase and proposes that banally good acts have the leading feature that the agent's reasons for action do not include the thought that the effects intended are good . It is argued, against David Blumenthal, that the label 'banal' should not be applied to (...) acts of spontaneous or everyday goodness but instead to those characterized by a lack of genuine moral commitment, for example, acts done purely in obedience to authority, or from self-seeking motives or mere habit. Finally, it is proposed that the doing of good in a banal mode may reasonably be encouraged in circumstances where more estimable moral motives may be lacking or feeble. (shrink)